Expressing the immeasurable: a methodology for developing a visualization tool for patients’ assessments of pain

The interdisciplinary field of pain medicine increasingly acknowledges the subjective aspects of chronic pain, and the difficulty for patients to adequately describe it. Although the field has developed rudimentary tools for accounting for subjective aspects of chronic pain that have gained widespread acceptance, more tools are increasingly needed, especially as medicine tends toward more patient-centred approaches. The project described is in preliminary, conceptual development. It is a visualisation tool that accounts for important, subjective aspects of pain: type, intensity, duration, and when it is possible to do so, location. The nature of communicating difficult, highly subjective experiences by patients and the ability of physicians to interpret them demand a new methodological approach, as outlined.